The works in this exhibition also explore themes of violence, injustice, and subjugation, as policemen wearing helmets and battle gear as familiar from photographs of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Yang combines depictions of police violence with European motifs of women from early Baroque until the 19th century; the faces that in mannerism express vulnerability become allegories of oppression in the midst of the oppressors. A fighter presents himself in quite a different way, crossing a ´red line´, armed and in a simultaneously defensive and aggressive pose, apparently all-too-resolute.
Alexander Ochs showed work by Yang Shaobin for the first time in 1999, hence the title of the exhibition, the same year the artist received great international recognition at the Venice Biennale curated by Harald Szeeman. Yang´s blood-red paintings (in Venice seen alongside the work of Sigmar Polke) were disturbing: They depicted people beaten beyond recognition. Their faces did not reveal realistic exactitude, but a blurry, fluid uncertainty.
Yang Shaobin´s work is currently on view at the exhibition Chinese Expressionism in Shanghai Art Museum (China Art Museum) and HOW Art Museum, Wenzhou, China, and the 2013 Sharjah Biennale, United Arab Emirates. In addition, the exhibition Blue Room is currently being shown at Arken Museum in Ilshøj, near Copenhagen.

Shaobin Yang -

Opening speech by curator and author Jan Hoet, Gent.

The restlessness, the rawness, the mysteriousness of his works are based on a field of appealing disharmony that captures one´s attention, keeps one searching and sensing. The beauty of these images is not to be found on the surface but rather in the depth of the artistic methodology. The British painter, composer, musician, poet, performance and video artist Chris Newman (*1958) has been living in Berlin since 1996 and now has his first solo exhibition at Alexander Ochs Galleries.

To find the beauty in Chris Newman´s paintings, one does not need to know the background of his work. It is even less required to identify any potential remnants of narratives. It is a sense of body, a genuine unconscious and the dismissal of rational control that makes Newman´s works so lively and filled with deeper beauty.

Chris Newman -